The Oil Road

by James Marriott

  Some kilometres on, we spot a marker at the top of a rise: number ‘24 km’, meaning 24 kilometers from the Azeri–Georgian border. We pull off and follow a bumping track till we hit the next marker: 25 km. There are strange mounds of earth everywhere here. Trying to make out a line of craters is going to be near-impossible. The route of the pipeline is clear, though, because the topsoil has not been properly replaced after it was laid.

  This is puzzling, because Guy referred explicitly to bombs having been dropped around marker 25 km. We have another piece of evidence. Manana had contacted the Georgian Oil and Gas Corporation for information about the bombing, and they had sent over a DVD with video clips and stills of officials visiting crater sites, taken on 10 and 12 August 2008 – the days following the bombing raids. We have the DVD with us, and use a laptop to scrutinise it again. It only confuses us more. The landscape is all wrong. In the videos, the grass is much higher, the land lower and marshier, with the craters in a valley between hillsides. Even the design of the posts seems different.

  We drive on, to the valley between 26 km and 27 km, thinking this must be the place in the video. But still no sign. We climb a nearby hillock: perhaps a view will help us. But nothing – just the valley with a stream running gently through it, and a flock of goldfinches that twitter past. Nearby are the shacks and sties that lead us to the farmer in the flat black cap. We had expected him to recollect the bombing and the craters, to tell us that people had come and filled them in. But no, his first line is: ‘I saw it on TV’. His house is only half a kilometre from the pipeline.

  This is getting more and more confusing. We approach another farming family, who are living in the ruins of a former Soviet collective farm. There is an old woman and two middle-aged men, one of whom speaks fluent English. ‘No, we weren’t here last August. We take the cattle to the mountains.’ We show him the video. ‘That’s not here’, he says. ‘In the summer the grass is all gone round here. That’s why we move elsewhere.’

  It’s dawning on us that the markers shown in the video are not those of BTC. The giveaway is the design – the BTC marker posts are taller, and the black kilometre numbers are smaller than in the video.

  We begin to think the videos might be fake: an attempt by the Georgian government to use the country’s position as an ‘energy corridor’, and BTC’s high profile, to bring the Western powers it serves into the conflict on its side. Manana, initially sceptical of this idea, starts to think the same. The regime, she tells us, has repeatedly released fake videos to promote its own interests. Three films were recently produced purporting to show one of the opposition parties buying weapons. The police claim the videos resulted from a sting operation, but few believe they are real. During the suppression of popular protests in November 2007, the regime also released videos that tried to compromise the oppositionists. These were widely believed to be fake. Perhaps this DVD of Russian bomb craters falls into the same pattern?

  Finally we decide to risk approaching the pipeline guards. A couple of these distant green figures have been watching us from the block valve compound at 28 km. Manana advises us to avoid alarming them, so we leave the car some way off and set out on foot. As we approach, we can see that the guards are wearing Georgian Army fatigues and combat gear, with semi-automatics slung over their shoulders. Later, reading documents released to Platform, we realise that they must be part of the State Pipeline Security Force, made up of 500 troops provided by the Ministry of Interior. Their role is the same as the Special State Protection Service troops in Azerbaijan.

  The four soldiers we approach are friendly and relaxed, apparently unbothered that we have been roaming around this stretch of pipeline for the last few hours. We ask them the same questions: No, they weren’t here at the time, but over in South Ossetia. Also, the pipeline wasn’t bombed here, but at BP’s parallel Baku–Supsa pipeline, several kilometres away.

  Ah. It seems we have been hunting not just in the wrong place, but along the wrong pipeline. This would explain why the marker post in the video did not look right. But the light is fading fast, and Manana needs to return to her four-year-old boy in Tbilisi. We will have to pick up the trail tomorrow.

  Here we are, scrabbling around at the fringes of BP, trying to understand and describe. Far off in the heart of its empire, in the offices of investors in London, it is supposedly a world of hard facts, lists of figures, statistics, solid data. At least here we know that we are in a maze of unknowns, of slipping and sliding possibilities.

  Setting out early the following morning, we reach the village of Akhali-Samgori, outside which the three pipelines – BTC, SCP and Baku–Supsa – in a rare moment, come close together. By comparing the post designs, we prove that the video shows markers along Baku–Supsa, not BTC, despite Guy’s report and Georgian government claims otherwise.

  In Akhali-Samgori we talk to a group of villagers gathered round a standpipe. An elderly woman is filling plastic containers with water and preparing to carry them to her house. Those we speak to complain that the pipelines run within metres of their homes. If the gas pipe explodes, they say, the whole village could be wiped out. Precisely this happened to the residents of Machuca in Colombia in 1998, when BP’s pipeline there was blown up by guerrillas: sixty-six villagers died and hundreds more were wounded.4 ‘We were afraid even before the recent war, but more so now’, one of the villagers tells us. ‘We feel like the village is occupied by the pipelines. Many of us weren’t even properly compensated, and none of us have gas. The gas could kill us – but we can’t cook with it.’

  We ask about the bombing. To our delight, one of the men says he knows where the craters are. At last. He hops into the front seat and gives directions to Ramazi. We retrace our route back to BTC 24 km marker, where yesterday we turned off the road, but now we carry on, into a wide valley. How could we not have noticed this valley before? The hills begin to assume a familiar shape – we have seen them before, in the video. The valley is lush and verdant, as it should be. We turn off the road, bumping and lurching along a track. And there, clear as day, is a line of gaping craters running down the hillside and along the valley floor. Between them, the Baku–Supsa markers. A herd of cows grazes nearby.

  The car pulls up. Camera in hand, we head for the post 25 km post. Around it are great mounds of earth and holes in the ground, several metres deep. When we climb down into them, we can only just see out. The route of the pipeline is obvious – the grass paler – so we pace out distances. The bombs fell about thirty metres apart. The two lines – one picked out by the marker posts, the other by craters – cross each other at right-angles. The bombs only just missed the pipeline: there are deep craters just fifteen metres either side of the route. Uncannily, we can hear distant explosions, but these are from training exercises at the Vaziani military base to our north.

  There is another line of craters, at a more acute angle, higher up the hillside. We count at least forty-five bombs dropped on this field. There must have been two bombing runs, with one pilot starting too early and either running out of bombs – or pulling out – before reaching the pipe.

  Back in the car, we go in search of Baku–Supsa 27 km, following the pipeline markers north-west. Suddenly there is a horseman up ahead, a young man on a mangy steed. There is a hint of red draped over his saddle – could he be a BTC guard? From our studious reading of Horizon, BP’s in-house magazine, we have an image of well-equipped ‘civilian security’ riders patrolling the route. Yet with his uniform half-off, a peaked cap rather than the regulation white safety helmet, and a sad-looking nag, he is a forlorn figure. Manana chats with him a little, he makes no attempt to stop us, and we part ways.

  Ten minutes’ drive further on, the 27 km marker stands in tall grass. The ground ten metres from the pipeline has been torn up by an enormous crater: it is deep, with a large pool of water in the bottom, and at least four metres across. This must have been a mighty bomb. On the hillside overlooking the site is an abandoned Soviet airbase,
with great hangars and bunkers built into the ground. The Russian Army occupied this site until a few years back, when they agreed to leave their Georgian bases. This was a targeted bombing run aimed at the pipeline – surely not an attack on the Georgian Vaziani base gone wrong.

  We try to work out the sequence of events. On 5 August 2008, just days before the start of the Georgia–Russia conflict, hundreds of miles west, near the town of Refahiye in Turkey, Kurdish PKK fighters blew up a section of the BTC. BP shut down the pipeline and immediately switched export to the recently refurbished Baku–Supsa. Although pumping at only a fraction of the capacity of BTC –150,000 barrrels per day, rather than 1 million – Baku–Supsa allowed at least some Caspian crude to be exported. Within days of the switch, Russian bombers dropped forty-five explosive devices by the 25 km marker on the Baku–Supsa route. Despite the near miss, BP continued to ship its highly valuable cargo through the pipeline until Russian forces advanced across it near Gori, on 11 August.

  On 12 August, BP announced it was suspending export through both Baku–Supsa and SCP, in addition to BTC. That night, another Russian plane dropped a series of bombs next to Baku–Supsa’s 27 km marker. Meanwhile, the Russian military continued to station its tanks on top of Baku–Supsa near Gori for another two weeks.

  So why did the press release of the Georgian Oil and Gas Corporation – the GOGC – inform the world that BTC was bombed when in fact it was Baku–Supsa? And why did BP deny that anything at all had happened, to journalists and British civil servants? Time to go and find out.

  Two days after seeing the craters, we went to visit first Matthew Taylor, head of BP Georgia External Affairs, and then GOGC. BP Georgia is headquartered in a discreet building next door to a university faculty, in the quiet Saburtalo district of Tbilisi. We go through a security check, past a roadblock, around the back to where the entrance is hidden; we hand in our passports, get security passes, go through a turnstile: security here is tight. We are met in the lobby by Tamila Chantladze, BP’s senior PR advisor in the country. Smiling and friendly, Tamila has worked for BP Georgia for nine years. She gives the impression of being the backbone of the company’s public image here, watching expat heads of external affairs come and go.

  We go upstairs into an open-plan office, where Matthew Taylor, tall and suave, offers us coffee and ushers us into his room. As we talk he is relaxed almost to the point of indifference, swinging back and forth on the back legs of his chair, occasionally checking the mobile that lies on the desk in front of him.

  We skirt round a number of topics before coming to the point. Did the Russians bomb the pipeline? ‘Who knows?’ Matthew responds nonchalantly. ‘You should ask the Russians.’ But then he grows serious.

  ‘Our public position to the media is that we were aware of no direct hit on our pipelines. There were marks within metres of Baku–Supsa, near where the pipelines separate. There’s also the Vaziani airbase nearby; maybe they were aiming for that. But it’s quite a few kilometres away. We had no interest in perpetuating the story, so we closed it down to the media.’ Then he adds, ‘The Georgian government tried to pull us in over the bombing, crying foul to the West. We didn’t feel it was substantiated enough. But we wouldn’t have done it anyway. We have to be extremely neutral in these situations. There was possibly some intimidation of Georgia by Russia, raising questions for Europe and the West whether Kazakh oil and Turkmen gas should come this way. But if they had bombed BTC, that would have been global; after all, we’re about 1 per cent of global oil consumption.’

  This might seem like a small percentage, but on a global level a loss of this crude into the international markets would have had a dramatic impact on the world oil price, especially during the summer of 2008 when oil was trading at a historic high. ‘As it was, we shut down Baku–Supsa when the Russians reached Gori, as we couldn’t guarantee the security of our staff. It had only reopened in July anyway, following years of repairs.’

  We emerge back into the street after forty-five minutes, and the public relations magic dust is wearing thin. BP had ‘closed down the story’ that the Georgians were trying to make public, and had done so by downplaying the incident. The deep craters that we had stood in had been reduced, in Matthew’s phrase, to ‘marks’.

  A taxi takes us to the offices of the Georgian Oil and Gas Corporation, out on the Kakheti Highway. The office block is visible from a distance, bold as brass with flags outside and a large sign on the main road to the airport. But for all its pomp, you can tell immediately on entering the lobby that power lies elsewhere. It is the exact opposite of BP Georgia’s offices. There is a sense of listlessness inside the building. The massive lobby is bare, with a wilting houseplant in a corner. A woman behind a small serving hatch in a kiosk sleepily gives us passes.

  We are met by Tamuna Shoshiashvili, PR manager for GOGC. She and her assistant Sofia guide us upstairs, past a score of aerial photos of the construction of BTC and SCP. But the Georgian company’s role in the pipelines is purely regulatory; it does not own a stake in either of them. Tamuna’s office feels far removed from Matthew’s. Filled with dark-brown rather than light furniture, it lacks his functional whiteboard and flipcharts. Plain light bulbs hang through crude holes drilled in the ceiling. On one wall she displays a ‘Certificate of Achievement: Workshop for Energy PR Workers and Energy Journalists’.

  We raise the issue of the bombing, and Tamuna puts forward her version of the events of 9 and 12 August. The bombs, she says, were dropped on BTC. When we query this, she changes her story: it was Baku–Supsa, she means. She remembers bringing a white-haired journalist – Guy Chazan – when they first visited the site. Looking over the video and stills together, we recognise Tamuna picking her way over the bombed earth in heels and a skirt. She explains how she came in on 9 August dressed for a normal day in the office, and was whisked away without time to change. Then they rushed out a press release and the images.

  Was she surprised at how little international coverage the bombing got? She is not sure it was so small. Was she surprised at how BP refused to engage with the story? She says we should ask them. We explain that Matthew Taylor told us they ‘closed down the story’. Tamuna pauses slightly, then says, deliberately, ‘It’s very interesting what you are asking.’ Does she think the presence of the pipelines makes Georgia a target? ‘Oh, I couldn’t answer that.’

  As we discuss events, it becomes apparent that, if there was a battle between BP and the Georgian state over the public presentation of the events, it took place higher up the ladder than Tamuna’s office, at ministerial or at least GOGC board level.

  Before we leave, Tamuna has Sofia stand on a chair and stretch to the top of a cupboard in her office. She grabs a precariously balanced lump of steel and drops it into our hands. ‘One of our souvenirs from the pipeline last August’, she says. Twisted and deformed, with no readable inscription, the reddish-brown lump of shrapnel from the site of the craters on Baku–Supsa offers no clue to its secrets.

  * Conflicting first hand & media reports from Georgia of Russian troops within Georgia, occupying territory (rapidly changing picture but includes Poti, c. 20km from Supsa, Senaki, Gori, c. 40km from Tbilisi) making risk to operating personnel uncertain and increasing.

  * BTC sites have not reported any bombs in the vicinity of our assets.

  * Non-essential foreign staff & contractors continue to be relocated to Turkey & Azerbaijan by road.5

  12 August 2008 – Memo from BP to banks in BTC Lender Group, 12 August 2008

  It was his assessment that the BTC had NOT been targetted in recent actions. I pointed out that the bombs fell very close to the pipeline but he said they were sure this was simply related to its proximity to the base not a specific targetting.6

  Memo from British embassy in Tbilisi reporting on a meeting with BP, 19 September 2008

  There was no indication that either BTC or the Western Route were targeted or bombed by the Russians. We were aware of these highly misleading
news reports at the time and are more than happy to refute these claims. Moreover, both pipelines were extensively surveyed before re-starting.7

  Email from BP to UK Export Guarantee Credit Group, 17 November 2008

  Digging into the memos and emails we obtained through freedom of information requests, we can construct a likely sequence of events. At perhaps 4 a.m. Georgian time on 9 August 2008, data from US spy satellites observing the Caucasus conflict was being processed by several analysts at the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) located at Fort Hood in Texas – the largest military base in the USA. It would have been 5 p.m. in Texas, the end of a regular working day for the members of the geospatial intelligence cell. Their imagery-extraction and models had picked up the bomb craters crossing Baku–Supsa. The team’s analysis was passed up the ladder to the NGA headquarters in the wealthy Bethesda district of Washington, DC. Here, beside the Potomac River, a GEOINT staff officer wrote up the analysis into a brief presentation, and circulated it to the Pentagon, the undersecretary of defence (intelligence) and the CIA’s South Caucasus Desk. The brief would have been read carefully, for the pipeline system is both the USA’s and Britain’s primary political and economic interest in Georgia.

  The staff officer’s job description also covers liaison with private industry, so his next call was most likely to BP America. How did the conversation go? ‘Sir, your pipeline in the Caucasus has just been bombed. You might want to check it. No, not BTC – that was shut down a few days ago. The small one, Baku–Supsa.’ BP head office in London will have quickly passed the message on to Bill Schrader in Baku and Neil Dunn, Matthew’s superior in Tbilisi. Schrader and Dunn probably decided, as Taylor told us, that BP ‘had no interest in perpetuating the story’ and came up with a response plan.